"food trends" news and stories

C'mon, admit it. We all love food, but sometimes a fad hits critical mass and you wish it would just disappear. Maybe it's the bacon craze, or the precious (and overpriced) cupcake hoopla that has you rolling your eyes. The editors over at Serious Eats have sparked a lively discussion about what trends they'd like to see go away forever. What's your pick?

Read the full story at Serious Eats.

Our friends over at Food2 pretty much summed up what the Slashfood editors are feeling: There are five food trends from 2010 that we are SO over. The tiny cakes above are just one of the things that make us weary. Vote in Food2's the poll and let them know if you agree.

Cake balls, best described as ooey-gooey cupcakes with two tops, have become a certifiable trend in Texas and South Louisiana.

"We've definitely created kind of a craze," admits Robin Ankeny, the baker behind the Cake Ball Company in Dallas, where the local paper recently ran a story on how to make Valentine's versions of the wildly popular treats.

Ankeny started selling cake balls in 2006, inspiring a horde of professional and amateur imitators – and a few detractors: "Put down the cake balls," an Austin blogger pleaded in a recent post bidding good riddance to the past year's fads. The treats were so ubiquitous by Christmastime that the Times-Picayune food editor Judy Walker reported in early 2009 that they "turned up at just about every party or gathering I attended."

Walker admitted she'd never before heard of cake balls, a sentiment shared by food experts across the region. While Ankeny insists cake balls are an old Southern tradition, the treats are still rarely found in states that don't share a border with Texas.

Professional culinary trend spotters may crunch numbers, poll diners and quiz chefs before issuing their predictions for next year's food scene, but their annual pronouncements hardly qualify as hard science. In most cases, food forecasters go with their gut.

In that spirit, Slashfood consulted a few psychics to find out what 2010 holds for the nation's eaters. Surprisingly or not, nearly all their readings jived with prophecies put out by fancy restaurant consulting firms.

A variety of buckwheat in full bloom. Photo: fishermansdaughter, flickr

Few American festivals celebrate a foodstuff as archaic as this weekend's Buckwheat Festival in Preston County, W. Va., which annually showcases a dish the New York Times deemed outdated nearly a century ago.

"According to millers, the consumption of buckwheat has fallen off not less than 30 percent in the last five years," the paper reported in 1910. "Where once the mounds of well-browned flapjacks, flanked by the molasses jug, reigned supreme at the breakfast table, now the patent breakfast foods alone are to be seen."

Corn flakes weren't the only culprit in buckwheat pancakes' disappearance from the American table: As new chemical fertilizers facilitated the farming of wheat, most growers abandoned the substitute crop. Buckwheat fields -- which occupied more than 1 million acres of U.S. land when the Times printed its buckwheat lament -- accounted for just 50,000 acres in 1964, when the USDA last bothered to count.

A few of those buckwheat farmers, no doubt, lived near Preston County, which pinned its economic hopes on the plant during the Depression.